David Dayen is a Los Angeles-based freelance writer and a contributor to Salon.

The concrete funneled out of the mixer and into the 18-foot pit, slowly undulating across the reinforcing steel girders. Two hundred trucks would converge on the site, making more than 2,100 trips to and from eight different concrete plants. After nearly 19 hours, 21,200 cubic yards of concrete would fill the pit, making it the largest continuous concrete pour in history, certified by the Guinness Book of World Records.

The pour, completed three weeks ago, provided the foundation for the 73-story Wilshire Grand, a $1 billion hotel, retail and office project in downtown Los Angeles, scheduled to be the tallest building west of the Mississippi when it opens in 2017. And the Wilshire Grand is among a gaggle of projects, 97 in all according to Los Angeles Downtown News, put into development in the rapidly reinventing neighborhood just in the past five months. Overall, 5,000 market-rate housing units will come online in the next two years, joining a boom in office space, museums, restaurants and brand-name shopping. Downtown L.A., left for dead amid the open spaces of Southern California, is back.

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The renaissance has taken many forms, including the culture clash between the new urban hipsters and the long-forgotten homeless we chronicle elsewhere in this series. Perhaps most consequential may well be the least tangible shift the downtown boom portends: Is it, at long last, changing the car culture of a city long defined by freeways and congestion?

Certainly, the combination of multiple new mass transit spokes and development around transit stations in recent years has brought the fantasy of movies like Spike Jonze’s Her—living comfortably in L.A. without a car—closer to reality. But the utopia of Her, with its luxurious rail cars, ubiquitous skyscrapers and crisscrossing footbridges, depicts a smoothly connected urban landscape without explaining where the rest of the city went. In a city made up of people and not just trains and high-rises, city planners have a challenge: how to make sure the benefits of trendy “New Urbanist” ideas reach everyone.

Right now, there’s definitely a target for all this downtown development: young people clamoring for a lifestyle that doesn’t involve driving 10 miles just to get a soda. “People have been going to New York, Chicago and seeing these great urban cities,” says Brigham Yen, a realtor, downtown evangelist and writer of the blog DTLA Rising. “They come back to Los Angeles in search of that same type of environment.”

The Politics of Downtown L.A.’s Comeback

By Warren Olney

Impressive as downtown Los Angeles’ renaissance has been, L.A. will never be a city defined by its central core. Sure, there are more than 50,000 people now living in what was once a deserted downtown. But that number’s dwarfed by the 4 million spread out across the rest of our 503 square miles.

That old joke that L.A. is “72 suburbs in search of a city?” It’s still true.

Politically, we’re all over the map, too. Each of L.A.’s 15 city council members oversees many distinct neighborhoods. The San Fernando Valley doesn’t want or need what South L.A. does; the South Bay has entirely different priorities from Hollywood, Silver Lake or the Westside.

And yet politics, inevitably, played an important role in L.A.’s reinvention, with council members whose districts cover parts downtown helping to create the boom there, beginning with two transformative events in 1999.

The first was the opening of the Staples Center, a 20,000-seat sports and concert arena, home to the NBA’s Lakers and Clippers and the NFL’s Kings. Staples was built for $375 million by the Anschutz Entertainment Group (AEG), a developer well connected at City Hall. Councilman Joel Wachs, a popular opponent of any public subsidies to private projects, objected to AEG’s demand for a tax break on parking fees to help finance construction. And AEG lost an important ally when Mayor Richard Riordan recused himself from negotiations to avoid an apparent conflict of interest because he owned the nearby Pantry Restaurant.

L.A.’s Roman Catholic archbishop, Cardinal Roger Mahony—then at the height of his power—stepped into the negotiations. Mahony wanted to build a new cathedral to replace the small, rundown St. Vibiana’s in the heart of downtown. Concerns were raised about the preservation of the old cathedral and gentrification around the new one, but Mahony argued that improving downtown was a worthy goal. He got AEG to promise to hire and train local workers, and allowed that St. Vibiana’s would get enough repairs to keep it standing, even as it ceased to be the headquarters for the archdiocese. Mahony’s clout, and full support from influential Council President John Ferraro, finally helped to overcome Wachs’s objection.

The economic impact was almost immediate. After opening in 1999, the next year Staples hosted the Democratic National Convention and the Lakers’ first national championship in 12 years. “It brought people to downtown who hadn’t been here for years,” says Carol Schatz, president of the Central City Association of Los Angeles, a downtown business organization. Many other large-scale developments have followed, including Mahony’s massive Cathedral of Our Lady of the Angels and Frank Gehry’s Walt Disney Concert Hall. And when AEG proposed L.A. Live—a $2.5 billion complex with three music venues, a 54-story hotel and a condo tower—it sailed through the council, thanks to the success of Staples Center.

The second transformative event of 1999 was less dramatic but just as important. The freeways that emptied out downtown had become so congested that trips to and from the suburbs were exercises in gridlock and road rage. As a result, people who worked downtown actually began to think about living there. The Central City Association, which wanted downtown transformed, and historic preservationists, who wanted it saved, together pushed the adaptive reuse ordinance, which expedited the approval process for renovating old buildings. Developers began turning decaying commercial and office buildings into apartments and condos. It worked, and as demand increased, there was a boom in new residential construction too.

Does all this mean downtown will become the heartbeat of Los Angeles and give us a coherent political identity? That’s impossible to imagine. Those 15 council members will still attend to diverse local interests, while downtown remains a boutique cityscape in the midst of our continuing suburban experiment. The essence of Los Angeles will always be sprawl.

Warren Olney is host and executive producer of “Which Way, L.A.?” and “To The Point” on Santa Monica, Calif.’s KCRW, one of the nation’s leading NPR affiliates.

The gentrification of city centers in America is by now an old story. But despite L.A.’s obsession with the cutting edge, downtown fell far behind the trend, like a past-his-prime actor reduced to straight-to-Netflix thrillers, perhaps because of that car culture that was once so cutting edge in its time. Downtown was once home to some of the greatest movie palaces of the last century, wedged among dozens of impressive Beaux Arts and Art Deco structures. But as suburbs exploded and the freeways took over (believe it or not, Who Framed Roger Rabbit tells this story best), the neighborhood languished. The last high-rise project in the historic core before the recent spate of development went up in 1961.

Boosters have predicted downtown’s comeback since the 1990s, but the return was gradual. Over time, the tolerance for more and more frontier subdivisions, stretching as far as 80 miles from the city, finally ran out. “Los Angeles was and still is the poster child of sprawl gone wrong,” says Brigham Yen. “The sprawl has hit the wall.”

Rethinking the downsides of sprawl coincided with a 2008 ballot measure called Measure R, which dedicated a half-cent sales tax for mass transit projects for 30 years. City leaders, hounded by demands to contain the city’s legendary traffic, envisioned a return to the way Angelenos got around before mass production of the automobile, when the city was laid out to facilitate streetcar lines. Three rail projects are currently under construction, including the first transit line to LAX Airport along Crenshaw Boulevard, and an expanded Expo Line that, upon completion, will go from downtown to the beach city of Santa Monica. These rail lines finally serve the biggest population centers in the city, ending decades when real public transit was simply not an option.

Now it’s all the rage. In just 20 years, the Metro Rail system has built six transit lines that feed into downtown—that’s as many lines as serve downtown Chicago. DASH bus service connects from the rail stations to neighborhood locations. And the city just secured a $700 million grant from Washington to create a regional connector to bring train lines together for seamless transfers. But money alone cannot ensure success, notes Ethan Elkind, the author of Railtown, a history of Los Angeles’s troubled transit past. “Despite the multibillion-dollar investment, it took specific policies to make development happen,” Elkind says. “You can’t just build the line and assume people will come.”

In 1999, for example, the city passed an “ adaptive reuse” ordinance for downtown, which allowed non-residential buildings to be rezoned for condos and apartments. It also freed developers from onerous parking and zoning requirements that could have derailed projects from the beginning. Adaptive reuse has flourished downtown, with several commercial and industrial spaces refashioned into lofts, a signature Ace Hotel recently opened in the former United Artists Building and even the iconic Library Tower considering a residential/hotel conversion.